Last Will and Testament
Dearest Assassin, Or at least, I hope the reader to be my assassin, and finally rid me of this mortal coil which has been forcefully thrust upon me. No amount of attempts on my own part so far have caused me to succeed, and indeed, whenever someone has come close to relieving me of my torment, that blasted light has forced its way into my arms and puppeteered me like some unfortunate marionette - I do not care if I died with dignity or not, all I ask is that you have killed me, before I saved myself. My understanding of my current situation is that you are likely one of the seven hyper-dimensional mercenaries that believe themselves to be in my employment. Or, rather, you’re probably not the skeleton, which leaves six suitable candidates. No other mortal, save maybe for the Progenitor Aboleth, could drag me from this world, and I don’t doubt the Diluvian threat would be a different matter entirely to my demise, as I have been told by Those On High that I will not live to see the conclusion of their invasion. Which leaves the six… seven, of you, to each of which I will address in turn. Perhaps I’ll answer some questions you may have, maybe even change the course of these wars we fight for the long run. Gods forgive if I shed ‘light’ on the situation. I was born, as I’m sure you remember, in 327 TG. Born is a word I use to describe the process, as it details my entrance into the world. In truth, my genesis came at the hands of a single man; an elf, in fact - Vincent Proce, “Alchemist of the Triage of Asylla”, one of three, alongside Geralt Asylla and Victoire Lutesce (no relation to myself, or darling Redecia’s brood, her surname is a rather intriguing coincidence of nomenclature and nothing more). Geralt was a mostly senile old fool, but such such characteristics are symptomatic of a life spent guzzling chemicals and cognatogen without a regard for the afflictions such habits might instil upon the physical. The Triage was named for him because of his willingness to co-operate with the Augustavus Papacy in the prior 200 years of his live, as before 125 TG, most state alchemists were commissioned under mutually beneficial circumstances - they were granted research grants and then utilised half of the funds for personal projects; Geralt was the first to find his love of alchemy in whatever projects the church assigned him. As an inventor, he was responsible for gunpowder, quick-setting concrete, lye, the printing press and many of the modern cures and assistances we have for afflictions that, nowadays, we consider “extinct”. Victoire and Vincent, however, took advantage of this trust. There was no malice in it, and Geralt loved the two of them as his own children (despite Victoire being of Ymmurian descent and Vincent under illusion most of the time to hide his infernal ears), but under his tutelage the two found themselves afforded more freedom than any alchemist had in history, or at least, the history we knew at the time. The P.A.E & A.E areas were but rumours in the circles of rebellion throughout much of my youth, until Lief Erikkson’s ‘White Acorn’ revolution brought the ‘promises of the oak tree; a strong core of values to last throughout the ages, and roots spreading throughout histories’. This, I suppose, is why the two, Vincent particularly, aligned themselves with the revolutionaries. They valued knowledge above fealty - Victoire believing knowledge to be a powerful tool of political merit, and willing to go to lengths unseen to fetch the highest amount of leverage, whereas Vincent believed it was a gateway to a societal enlightenment, the foolish optimist. I have since read his diaries, and have discovered that, despite his bluffing when the seven of you confronted him about his ethereal history, Vincent was indeed fully aware that he was a reincarnated soul. His mad scribblings focussed on the life and times of one “Tavar Kriekargaard” (an inherited Canim surname meaning ‘Unbroken Spirit), the Green Kokiri of the Age of Enlightenment, who fought as part of the Coronet at the end of the age to quell deific suppression. How ironic. How he figured out this link to Tavar Kriekargaard, I have no idea, but I do not doubt divine intervention may have played a part. Vincent used the link, however, to track down the vellum writings of Ezra the Mad Alchemist, a figure I hereto assumed to be a myth until well into our anachronistic little operation. Ezra’s writings concerned concepts that are axiomatic to our understanding of metaphysics, including his illustration of the role the 7 colours have in the universe. # White - Order # Blue - Perfection # Black - Ambition # Red - Emotion # Green - Destiny # Purple - Entropy # Gold - Creation ' ' He divided the entirety of magic, existence, and reality into those seven categories, expanding upon the relevance of certain areas to certain colours, and then professed himself to be not an alchemist, but a Gold Mage - A Mage of Creation. Such a claim excited my old brother, Vincent, and he quickly set to work trying to understand the ins and outs of the latter two unknown colours of the spectrum, particularly focusing on the role Gold had to play in the world. That was his downfall, you see, as the latter two are inherently tied towards outside influence, they are external influences on our reality, and therefore, crafts we are unable to attain alone. The primary five colours - white, blue, black, red, and green - are all internally attainable forms of magic, reflected in the nature of every individual, species or category of geography in reality. The latter two require consultation. So consult, he did. It was the harvest season of 324 TG that Vincent first made contact with the Aeon we now know as Kakar. I know this, because he marked the day in his notes as “The First Time he Truly Saw the Sunrise”. There is nothing more written upon that day. In the following months, his consultations with Kakar would grow more and more meditative, as he would recluse to his studies on alchemical philosophy. Vincent’s ultimate goal, it seemed, was to create a homunculi - a crude, alchemical imitation of life with no natural progeny, but in his consultations he had discovered that such an endeavour would be impossible - creation as an aspect needed to be breathed into everything before it could truly be considered life. He’d tried, of course, what kind of scientist would he be if he’d not at least made attempts? However, each of his homunculi stuttered and died when taken out of their bell jars, until Vincent was finally convinced by Kakar to allow her assistance. He gathered the collective materials needed to build an entity, including a vial of his own blood, and then transported himself beyond the walls of Dominion to the base of the spire we know as God’s Ascendancy. The elven term for it is Cicatrice Segno, the ‘scar sign’. It is one of the few areas we agree upon. He conducted his ritual, and allowed Kakar’s power to pass through him as he practiced his crude semblance of science, tainted with magic, until a mold began to grow in the center of the pool of ingredients he had gathered. He scraped it together into a petri dish, and brought it home with him. And slowly, over the next year, I began to grow. There was a problem, however - not from my perspective, but from Kakar’s. I had been born outside of the Chronoloop, technically. God’s Ascendancy exists in an area where the veil between planes is thin, and the creep of Divinity (Divinity is a rather tangible concept) can push through. I was not there long enough in my gestation to be contaminated with that curse, but enough of it seeped into my emergent cells that I was born more aware of the way reality was built, and how things worked. This gave me rather more free-will than Kakar would have enjoyed, so she devised that Vincent would create a soporific to dull my senses in order to make me more amenable - Vincent was told it was because my unnatural birth may have caused me to menace unpredictably. I spent the first century of my life on the teat of that soporific, long after Vincent had died, until I was distracted from my supply long enough to understand why it was deemed necessary. In my own way, from that point, I began to rebel against Kakar, but try as I might, to this day I can feel her influence in every artificial bone and joint in my body. I have bouts of unconsciousness, and have had them throughout my existence, where I have woken up to find my hands have wrought creations my mind had not dreamt, or that I had written notes that my mouth did not know the words for beforehand. You see, it was Kakar’s idea to prepare for a war I did not even know was coming. Her dulcet whispers in my ears at night when I tried desperately to grab sleeping hours that were denied me spoke of abominations belonging to “The Enemy”, primordial entities that would do nothing until they consumed all of reality. She showed me images of the darkness on the cusp of our own reality, on the fringes of the solar-system where prudential plane wanes into the falls of reality and the shell of our knowledge cracks and bleeds into the planes beyond. She showed me the Phyrexians, and the pain and destruction they would bring, and taught me how to build an engine of war that would rival their own, crafting ‘Lysjord’, the ‘Empire of Light’, from the ashes of Terce’s Grace. There were nations out there who could not understand the pragmatism required of the work thrust upon me, and indeed, my dreams of creating the world that Vincent would be proud to have as a legacy were scattered before the issues that threatened the world. I dreamed of a Second Great Age of Enlightenment, but Kakar only had time for the Greater Good, and through the arguments she presented, I was inclined to agree with her. So rolled forth the industrial beast of Lysjord, bringing nuanced contraptions of my own design to the fold at a rate faster than society could match. Alliances were made with the Canim, who could recognised the fevered project from their own history, but the Elves and indeed those remnants of Dominion that persisted could not abide the regime, and as a result, harsher methods of defence were put into place - those admittedly, of my own design. As our optics improved, we began to see the other planets in our systems - Thrull, were the dragons found asylum after Damu’s invigoration of Brentia’s core; Keldeos, the realm of the Aboleth and all that Naamuur, their mad God, could create; Thran, a world of deserts and law, where celestial sphinxes ruled from the shadows; Corsica, the acrid waste that was coated in effluvia not too different from my own progeny, and finally, after years of searching, we spotted her. The Tomb. Diluvia. The speckled marble on the edge of reality, near grazing the veil of stars on the cusp of our reality, streaked in purple and gold and coated in a thick layer of smog. We began to scope out their resonances, and found that, alarmingly, each planet echoed the power of a certain colour on the spectrum, save for Diluvia. # White - Thran # Blue - Keldeos # Black - Corsica # Red - Thrull # Green - Brentia Diluvia echoed a death-knell of Purple & Gold, and not even the infrequent consultations I now had with Kakar could tell me why. Would tell me why. All she would inform me of was the coming invasion, the history that would allow for them to follow the legacy of the fae to our world. she made suggestions, frequently, and was often forceful in her tone, but no longer did she puppet me - I am far too broken a man to resist. It was her suggestion to create a Deity. That was the initial idea - raise a child in the ascendancy, create her a warden and send her off into some unknown future where her traumas and experiences might cause her to be strong enough to see off the threat, and act as a vanguard against any other enemy that Kakar saw fit to champion against. The Lutesces were chosen for this task - Richard Lutesce was my adopted child some thirty years before the war broke, and I’d grown to love him as my son very quickly. His choice in wife, Carla, was a wise one, and her kindness could see past the pragmatic veneer I’d thrown in the face of the world - the two of them were trusted with my closest held secrets, including the nature of my birth, and agreed to take part in the experiment as a gift to me. They were the most brilliant scientists in my employ, regardless, so if anyone could spy an ulterior motive regarding inter-planar politics, it would be those two. So off I sent them to Cicatrice Segno, and not one year later, baby Redecia was brought into the world. Meanwhile I was busying myself trying to find some way of counteracting Kakar’s control over me. My focus was strong, but even while she was puppeteering my muscles I could only afford myself as much as a few seconds of agency. It was a power I’d never contended with before, something I had no comparison to. The only thing I had at my disposal was knowledge. And money; being a dictator affords you a lot of money. I began to create laboratories and research labs that weren’t focussed on the usual societally-benefitting technological advances. Up to that point the majority of my research had been pragmatic - televisions, cable services, energy creation, water purification, the kind of science that benefits a society that doesn’t have its head in the clouds. I could understand that things such as interplanetary flight and temporal management had their appeals, but a computer made from necromantic clocks has only so many applications, and you don’t want to have to include penicillin in your antivirus software. Just because magic could do something, didn’t mean it had to, that was my philosophy when it came to science. It was the method of Dominion, after all - all research had to benefit the church and the state; speculative alchemy was criminal. However, a dictatorship that created flat-screen TVs and state of the art washing machines couldn’t help be fight the Phyrexians or learn of Kakar’s weaknesses, so I set about cleaving my magical practices and my scientific ones together. The first major discovery I made was space-flight, technically. We found that, despite projected models of dissipation, the atmospheric pressure of the lower stratosphere was present throughout the ‘void’ between planetary models, meaning that the legends we’d found of Urza’s ships being able to fly through space may have some basis. Essentially, the zones between planets are breathable, and provide an escape route that the Phyrexians cannot reach should it be necessary. Efforts to construct inter-planetary residences were put into action, but it was difficult to create a craft capable of the flight necessary to transfer more than just a drone computer to space. It is an endeavour that plagues me to this day. For Redecia’s fifth birthday, the Luteces invited me for dinner where they sprang me with two surprises. The first; they would like me to be her godfather - I agreed, and added their name to my own as a symbol of my devotion to the child. The second, however, was more professional. Through the implementation of a device that enlarges all within an area, the two had managed to isolate an area of vacuum and enlarge the fabric of spacetime itself, until it could be visibly analysed. What they had discovered was that the fibres of reality were all made out of the same core substance, but the lattice of this substance determined the design of the creation. Tangle AEther a certain way, you get the baseline for a plane, or a soul, or a teapot. Through careful analysis of these samples, they had identified a number of things that affected the AEther in an unanticipated way - particularly, God’s Ascendancy, and Vir. God’s Ascendancy as a location twisted the lattice of souls further, gently over time, but it had an inevitable effect - to be short and sweet, the pair had identified the source of divinity itself. Vir, however, could not be found naturally anywhere upon the lattice, no matter how they twisted it. At first the two had presumed that Vir was beyond their current comprehension, but after a trip to the Dragonblood Pool far-east, they discovered something alarming. The substance was extraplanar, and seeped into our world, corrupting the lattice of AEther, rotting it. Their suggestion was that it had to come from somewhere, and they requested funds to research this. Which, to cut a long story short, is how I first contacted Qxm. My first impressions of Qxm as an Aeon were intriguing - he has remained the only thing in or out of this world to instill a sense of pure terror within me. While Kakar enjoyed talked to me through my thoughts, and visiting me in my twilight hours, Qxm’s personality was very clearly demonstrated through the method he chose to communicate.Upon the first successful analysis into the cracks of reality that vir seeps through, from the Lutesce’s perspective, I simply ceased to exist. I found myself in a chamber of cosmic proportions, surrounded on all sides by eyes, hands, worms and fleshy protrusions. The world smelled of rot. Before me, the size of our star, hung an eye in the air, ringed with teeth. Qxm spoke to me, told me other sides to certain stories, and proposed a deal. The deal was simple; I was to channel all of my mental faculties and resources into creating a portal capable of launching individuals to the center of a “World Tree”. ‘Yggdrasil’, Qxm told me, was the lattice at the core of our reality, almost like a guiding stick for a gardener planting tomatoes. Reality, in his words, was formless, and a third Aeon, Lux, utilised the shape and strength of Yggdrasil to give the world around us form. This tree was grown from a conceptual well, apparently. I’ll return to the deal Qxm made me in due time, but I must prioritise the information I think will be of use to you, and even now in my secluded safe room, I can feel my control waning. I’ve sketched a map for your benefit. ' ' One can imagine a tree trunk along the center, like a constellation map, with the roots growing from the “River of Dreams and Concepts” and the canopy stretching far into the expanse beyond “Deos Accomos” - the home of the Gods. Our reality is apparently structured around the central trunk - a trunk which can be found physically within God’s Ascendancy in similar spires on the other five planets. On can trace a trajectory to each of these demi-planes of reality. It should be noted that I have added the Crack in Time and Ezra’s Hideaway from my own notes, Qxm did not disclose or potentially know the location of these two areas. To take a closer look, here is God’s Ascendancy. These are the locations apparently affected by the time loop, as detailed to me by Qxm. Everything else around the tree of Yggdrasil exists independently of Lux’s loop, but these locations are made of the most familiar Aether to us, and can exist beyond a conceptual state. As a result, they are the center of our existence, and the focus of Lux’s attention. Prudence is the name of our material plane, where the six planets and the sun reside, but each of the six elemental planes are also made of the same matter, and indeed, have a physical location in relation to Prudence. After extensive research, utilising both the information Qxm gave me and the time in isolation, I managed to piece together an understanding of how the dimensional engine worked. Redecia, it was mostly your mother who worked this out. She’d have been modest, but I want you to know to be proud of her. Each of the six elemental planes - fire, earth, water, air, positivity and negativity, whilst domains of traditional arcane magic, also correspond to a planet within our system. ' ' They appeared to function as support columns, with the material plane in the middle. I realised that the four hells and the four heavens were all planes that have appeared in our mythos in history as areas where Legends have travelled to: ' ' ' ' And began to construct a hypothesis; what if these places were as reachable as the other planets or continents in our world? On paper, of course, such endeavours are engineering miracles - but they’re still possible, you can, theoretically at least, fly to another planet, or swim to the southern continent - it just so happens that we utilise machines like planes and boats to assist in this. We worked under the hypothesis that these were real places to be found that could be visited without the assistance of magic, and began our work trawling through history books to find any discernible location where they might be. We took about 18 months to find a hole that led to Sheol. The town was a small one in Eastern Lysjord by the name of “Silent Hill”, it became apparent quite quickly from our surveyors that Silent Hill was actually built upon the entrance to Doomhelm, an ancient Dwarven megacity wherein the Dwarves apparently dug too deep and managed to create a tunnel that span underneath the Steppe. I know that I’ve since sent you here in the past, to retrieve Kazarik’s Golden Hammerhead, but the location was at the time a ghost town. Gradually, we sent recon teams down, to test the thaumaturgic radiation that had been reported in the area. Over the course of a few weeks teams reported back the odd spot of Positive Alpha Radiation, but mostly found a dead catacomb that went down quite deep. Eventually, a team reported finding the apparent atrium that Kazarik had his last stand, and inside they’d found a curious pair of skeletons - one gigantic, another Tengu, with a metallic prosthetic hand - and all around them were inscriptions on the wall about a portal to an underworld, one matching the description of Sheol. The story unfolded that after Kazarik’s stand, the energy trapped within his hammerhead ripped a hole in reality, causing the staircase below the atrium leading to the city to instead fall into one of the hells. This was no longer the case, though residuals of the plane’s signature were still available in the air, and we were able to utilise these signatures to track other such incursions elsewhere in the world. We tracked one to the mountains of Lyrricania, that lead to Infernall, the Hell of Fire. I began the slow and arduous process of a trade deal in return for access to the site. In the meantime, our scouts dug ever deeper under the town of Silent Hill, and as they dug, they encountered horrific flesh-crafted monstrosities, the likes of which modern magic or science hadn’t seen. Other than myself. We’d estimated that this section of the Doomhelm mines hadn’t been accessible for a good thousand years, not since before Kazarik fought Terce to save his people. The ruins we encountered beyond the royal atrium were in perfect, untouched condition, other than the creatures that already dwelt that deep. Our scouts came across an intersection, with one direction leading East, revealing the tunnel below the Steppe that Asterius Genlon had used to transport the Dwarves to meet the Fae. The other direction led further down. Down into into the depths of Brentia itself. Where I discovered something that truly opened my eyes to the Aeons’ intentions. Everything in me wanted to pull me away from the shaft below Doomhelm. I found it disconcerting, and not just because I knew the hole I was staring down was the one Melek Taus had given his life in a thousand years earlier. One side of me, Qxm’s, was dragging me down, the other, Kakar’s, was dragging me away. I had a feeling that they both had plans down there, but one of them didn’t want me involved. There were many times in my life where I watched the Aeons control me, from a distance, unable to fathom what was occurring, whilst also terrified and balking at what my body was doing without my consent.This was one of the few times where I imagined the opposite was the case. My men and I began to belay down, and what we found was incredible. After two days of caving we discovered the first crystal veins. Shards of green crystal not too dissimilar from the Ka’kari Vincent used to create me. Samples we took confirmed them to have great power in Natural magic. I sent them back to Warforged R&D for my soul creation experiment, and then we continued down. After a week, we were at the core of the planet. Catacombs had spread off, snake link, and the green veins of crystalised ore gave off a kind of light. The world down there was jungle-esque, similar to the Southern Continent, just growing throughout the cave systems. The core itself was gigantic, a large Emerald, like a Ka’kari, only a thousand times bigger. Around it, we found ruins. Our translators worked tirelessly, and we surmised the purpose. They told the story of the planets, of the colours of magic, of everything. The Elves are at the door, I don’t have much time. I have to stash this last letter for you, in case they capture me. Look, I know I haven’t been kind to you, but it was mostly out of my control. I’ll tell you what I know, you’re my last hope now. The planets are the dynamos of a great, magical ritual, like an arcane creation engine, you need to interface with each core before you reach the Tomb. Doing so will break the loop. There’s another thing I think I’ve figured out. The order of activation matters - each colour of magic represents something, and the order in which you “activate” the planets will flavour the priority of the laws of nature in the new world. They’re here. I have to run. I love you all, and I’m sorry. Your friend and burden. Giovanni Proce. We took about 18 months to find a hole that led to Sheol.